The Second World War - Tapa blanda

Críticas

His singular ability to make huge historical events accessible to a general audience recalls the golden age of British narrative history, whose giants include Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle. (Boyd Tonkin THE INDEPENDENT)

Beevor can be credited with single-handedly transforming the reputation of military history. (David Edgar The GUARDIAN)

A truly outstanding historian of war (Michael Howard STANDPOINT)

A British historian of great distinction and range, who ... demonstrates his mastery of his sources. (Gordon Craig NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS)

His accounts of the key moments in the second world war have a sense of colour, drama and immediacy that few narrative historians can match (Dominic Sandbrook THE SUNDAY TIMES)

If you want to understand the war as military struggle, this book is all you really need. However well you thought you knew the subject, you will learn something new on every page. (Neill Denny WE LOVE THIS BOOK online)

You feel yourself being carried along on the narrative flow, channelled this way and that through the pools and rapids by Beevor's expert helmanship. (Patrick Bishop STANDPOINT)

Brocaded with details of the great campaigns and thoughtful explanations of Hitler's murderous belligerence, The Second World War is an absorbing, unsparingly lucid work of military history. (Ian Thomson THE SPECTATOR)

The myriad pieces of this intricate kaleidoscope are pieced together with exemplary skill. (Roger Moorhouse THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY)

This is a splendid book, erudite, with an admirable clarity of thought and expression. (Roger Moorhouse THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY)

Reseña del editor

The Second World War began in August 1939 on the edge of Manchuria and ended there exactly six years later with the Soviet invasion of northern China. The war in Europe appeared completely divorced from the war in the Pacific and China, and yet events on opposite sides of the world had profound effects. Using the most up-to-date scholarship and research, Beevor assembles the whole picture in a gripping narrative that extends from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific, from the snowbound steppe to the North African Desert, to the Burmese jungle, Gulag prisoners drafted into punishment battalions and to the unspeakable cruelties of the Sino-Japanese War.

Moral choice forms the basis of all human drama, and no other period in history has presented greater dilemmas both for leaders and ordinary people, nor offered such examples of tragedy, the corruption of power politics, ideological hypocrisy, betrayal, perversity, self-sacrifice, unbelievable sadism and unpredictable kindness. Although filling the broadest canvas on a heroic scale, Beevor's THE SECOND WORLD WAR never loses sight of the fate of the ordinary soldiers and civilians whose lives were crushed by the titanic forces unleashed in this, the most terrible war in history.